Separating fact from fiction in the Pennsylvania election process

Deceased voters

Pennsylvania is one of nine states that have statutes that prohibit counting absentee ballots submitted by voters who died before Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ten states have laws that explicitly allow the counting of absentee ballots cast by voters who die before Election Day.

County election officials in Pennsylvania regularly update their voter registration lists when voters die. The Pennsylvania Department of Health sends data on resident deaths to the Pennsylvania Department of State, and counties use that data to remove deceased individuals from their voter rolls, Mark O’Neill, a spokesperson for the Department of Health, wrote in an email mail.

Pennsylvania law allows counties to use Department of Health information, published obituaries and testamentary documents to confirm that a voter has died, said Geoff Morrow, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State.

“Once a voter is marked as deceased, if the ballot is returned, it cannot be accepted,” said David Voye, division manager of the Allegheny County Elections Department.

Pennsylvania’s election code states that election results cannot be invalidated simply because a recently deceased voter’s ballot is included in the count, Morrow said.

In 2021 a man from Pennsylvania who illegally voted for Donald Trump on behalf of his long-deceased mother was sentenced to five years’ probation in the 2020 election. But such cases are “exceptionally rare,” said Veronica Degraffenreid, senior manager of strategic partnerships in elections and government programs at the Brennan Center and former acting secretary of state of Pennsylvania.

“There are, you know, no gangs of bad actors taking over the identities of dead voters,” said Forrest Lehman, Lycoming County elections director.

Counting votes

In past elections, false and misleading claims have focused on the time it takes Pennsylvania counties to count votes. But such claims misrepresent why the process is relatively slow.

Pennsylvania law requires election officials to wait until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day before they can begin processing mail-in ballots and preparing them for counting. The actual preparation of mail-in ballots cannot begin until after the polls close. Because of the overall volume of ballots — they represented nearly a quarter of the total votes in the 2022 midterm elections — and the varying amount of time it would take for the state’s 67 counties to count those votes, determining a winner in a highly competitive race could last several days, as in the 2020 presidential election.

“We are one of the few states that have some form of early voting, but we don’t have any pre-processing of those ballots,” Mallinson said. “This is not a fraud that is happening. This is simply the time it takes to process these ballots.”